Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  It made me feel old telling him these things because it seemed so long ago, and because Willett kept going, “Gosh,” after everything I told him.

  I helped Willett lower himself down in a crack between two big rocks where I thought the way to Aunt Ohio’s ledge might be, and Willett and I worked our way out there and sat where me and Aunt Ohio had sat. I told Willett how Aunt Ohio told me there should be magic, and he pooched out his lip and nodded his head at that. I stood up and walked out to the edge, like an Indian princess again, looking for game, looking for my lost hunter to come home, and a crow cawed like a courthouse busybody.

  Willett said, “I wish we had hot chocolate,” and I told him about June telling me one time about this hot chocolate she had in Italy that was rich and thick and tasted like chocolate pudding, and I wished me and Willett were in Italy, even though I’d never been nor even thought much about it.

  Willett said, “Look at that,” and pointed to an empty dented-in pop can next to the back wall of the overhang. It was the kind of pop in the strange yellow truck I had seen in Lexington on the way home from the governor’s. Willett said, “Man, that’s a good kind of pop. That’s the kind automatically fills back up if you treat the can right.” I felt like maybe Willett was about to play a trick on me, but I let him. He picked the can up and rubbed his thumb across the open hole on top of the can, and the can sealed itself up. Willett shook the can back and forth and told me he had seen this kind of pop when he was in North Carolina. He said this kind of pop was real expensive and when he was in college he never could afford it. As Willett talked, the dent came out of the can. The can filled back up with pop. Willett held the can in front of me and said, “Some pop,” and then he opened the can. Willett took a drink out of it and I could hear the pop fizzing in his throat. Willett said, “Open your mouth,” and I did and he said, “Bend your head back,” and I did and he poured the pop into my mouth, and it was tasty, like ginger ale.

  I put my hand up, to tell him to stop pouring, and with my head still tilted back I said, “That’s amazing,” and I thought, this is Aunt Ohio’s magic.

  Willett said, “Do you want to know how I did that?”

  I thought, no, not really. Willett showed me his thumb and it was black and he said, “Here’s the ink I wiped off the top of the can that made it look like it had already been opened.” Then he tipped the can and pop squirted out a hole in the side of the can. “Here’s where I stuck a tack,” Willett said, pointing at the hole in the side of the can where the pop was squirting out, “to let out some of the pop before I come up here. Here,” he said, holding up a piece of tape, “is the piece of tape I used to cover the hole while I was packing the can up here.”

  “And when you shook the can,” I said, “the gas in the pop made the can pop back out like it was full again.”

  “Exactly,” Willett said.

  “You packed that trick pop all the way up here,” I said.

  “I did,” Willett said.

  “Did you know all the time you were going to pull this gag?” I said.

  Willett said, “I thought, maybe.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “I’ve got all kinds of tricks,” Willett said, with a gassy baby smile.

  “Why explain the trick?” I said. “Why not just let me be amazed?”

  “I don’t know,” Willett said. “It just seemed like more fun if we both knew.” Willett took another sip of the pop. “Do you want any more of this?” he said.

  I shook my head and Willett finished the magic pop. A pebble fell from above. June stood above us at the overlook. She did not seem to have heard us. Willett didn’t see her yet. He was trying to decide whether or not to save his magic pop can. June stood with her hands in her pockets.

  “June,” I said. She couldn’t hear me. I said her name again, yelling it. The sound startled her, and it seemed for a second like she might lose her balance. She looked behind her, and I had to call her name a third time before she figured out where the sound was coming from. When she saw me, she smiled. “Wait there,” I said. Willett put his magic pop can in his pants pocket, and we went up to where June was. On the way up there, Willett stopped me.

  “You don’t need to drink so much,” he said. “OK?”

  Willett nodded and we walked on up to the top. June sat on a rock and stood up when she saw us. She smiled in the sunshine. She hugged us each when we got close enough. Her hair smelled of the woods. I imagined she had been lying down somewhere on the hillside.

  “It’s always so good and quiet on Christmas,” June said.

  Willett looked around, at the trees behind us, at the sweep of mountains below us. He squinted in the light. “Man, it’s cold,” he said.

  I asked June where everybody was. She said the organizer girls had come to Cora’s, and they were being happy together about the settlement. “They’re wondering where you are,” June said to me.

  “It sucks the state has to pay the companies for them not to mine,” I said. “If it’s unsuitable, it’s unsuitable. They aint got no God-given right to mine. Why do the taxpayers have to give them all them millions?”

  June said, “Eight thousand acres protected, Dawn.”

  “How many acres is that?” I said, and pointed off the overlook.

  “Gosh,” Willett said. “A million?”

  “Hundreds of thousands,” June said.

  I don’t know why I had turned so so

  ur.

  “They’re talking about going to your mother’s baptizing Sunday,” June said.

  I asked June was she going. She nodded yes. I asked was it at Lower Drop Creek Church, Blondie Kelly’s church. June nodded yes.

  “You going?” Willett said, looking at me.

  ***

  Blondie Kelly’s church had carpet on the floor and aluminum siding and padding on the pews and was wide and low with fluorescent lights and a homemade pulpit and lean older men with thinning white hair and plain open-neck shirts and stout younger men with groomed beards and many-colored sweaters sitting on pews behind the preacher, who had cheeks shiny as apples and thick forearms from working in the coal mines all week. A guitar player, drummer, and electric bass player were situated around a long straight-haired woman at a piano, and they played along as she sang, “I’ve got so much to thank Him for, so much to praise Him for, you kno-oh-o-w, He means so much to me-ee-e.”

  The Sunday Momma got baptized, Decent Ferguson was there in a pretty skirt on the pew in front of us, and of course Blondie Kelly was there with her brothers and mother. Denny and his daddy Fred and his mother Genevieve, they were there, and so were Albert and Evie and Houston and Cora and June and me and Willett.

  The baptizing took place in what looked to me like a humongous hot tub at the front of the church. They had garbage bags held on with duct tape over Momma’s bad ankles. Momma in her white robe cried and let the men from the church hold her up. The preacher talked over Momma and asked her questions about being righteous and serving the Lord and such, and then he laid her in the water, and when she came up all the church people came up, wrapped her in pale blue towels, laid their hands on her, and singing started again and kept up for a good while, and all of us cried, at least a little. Albert bawled his eyes out, and went up there and joined the people piled up laying hands on Momma, and I remember being happy for all of them, for all of us, and I remember thinking, people change, I guess. They don’t always change the way they want to change, or even in the direction they set out to change in. I looked at Mamaw. She held a stick of gum out to me. It was Juicy Fruit. I took it and gave half to Willett. As he put the gum in his mouth, Willett turned to the back of the church. Then he leaned into my ear and said, “Look.”

  I turned around and Hubert stood at the back of the church. By this time I didn’t trust my own eyes, and I asked Mamaw, “Is that Hubert?” and she said, “I’d heard he got out,” and Hubert came up the aisle. He had his hair cut and was all cleaned up. He looked like Dadd
y. The preacher spread his arms wide, and the people parted. Some people’s mouths fell open, and others smiled like ho-hum, another day at church, another miracle. My mother, swaddled up in the pale blue towels, reached out her hand to Hubert, and he took it. Then Hubert said something quiet to the preacher, and the preacher told us another soul wanted to come to Jesus. Then they baptized Hubert, and they hugged on him, too, and Momma stepped down on the floor below Hubert, and she was shaking so somebody put a red blanket on her over the towels, and she looked up at Hubert, and Decent Ferguson turned around in the pew in front of us, with a look on her face I couldn’t make sense of, and said, “Aint that something?” I looked at Mamaw, and she looked at me with eyes cool as creek rocks and said, “Good for them.” Then Aunt June reached across Willett’s lap and took my hand in a way that said, “Hang on,” and when I looked at her, her face was the future, and it was full of

  Aunt Ohio left Mamaw hundreds of thousands of dollars, or as Mamaw put it, “a considerable sum.” Aunt Ohio made most of it investing in the coal business, so Mamaw took the money and paid for helicopter rides for journalists—local and state, national and international—to come look at the mining from above. If they can see how bad it is, Mamaw said, and do a decent job telling the story, that will put a stop to it. Mamaw believed this, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.

  On a cold clear day the February after Aunt Ohio died, the first helicopter flew over from Kingsport. Mamaw arranged for a newspaper man from Louisville to take the tour. The helicopter landed in the ballfield next to the community college. Me and Mamaw walked towards the pilot who walked towards us.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “Who we’re waiting for aint here,” Mamaw said. “He’s coming from Louisville.”

  The helicopter pilot had on yellow sunglasses. Mamaw was paying him hundreds of dollars an hour. He looked at a clipboard. After a minute he said, “Is there someplace I could get a cup of coffee?”

  Mamaw pointed towards the community college. When the man walked away, Mamaw said, “If that reporter aint here by the time he gets back, I want you to go.”

  I said, “Me? I don’t want to go.”

  Before he went back to jail, Hubert took me out driving six or seven times, and after that Mamaw let me take her everywhere. When Hubert went back to county, I drove Momma to see him. He didn’t say much, just looked out the slit of a window in the detention center visiting room at the brown grass, the dead bushes. When he went off to prison, Hubert wrote me long letters full of stories about my father, and what Hubert said lit up the places they’d been, made their paths and hiding places and battlegrounds glow before my eyes. June kept asking me to come live with her, but when Mamaw stopped asking me when I was leaving, I just stayed.

  Mamaw caned her way over to the Escort. She came back with a camera.

  “Here,” she said, handing me the camera. “Get ready.”

  When the pilot came back, I looked around for the reporter. The pilot looked at his clipboard again, and then his watch. I waved my hand at him, and we walked to the helicopter. The pilot opened my door, and I climbed in. When he was in his seat, he handed me a pair of headphones. The pilot started the helicopter, and it sat spinning, blowing the grass flat beneath it. The pilot said into my ear, “Are you ready?”

  I nodded and the helicopter lifted off the ground. At first it was like looking off the roof of a building, and then we were too high to survive if you jumped. I became something other than human. I was vapor. I was air. I was someone’s voice, the words they said when no one was around, their words floating up, up, up, and settling right below the clouds, eventually blown to separate letters by the wind, then chopped into bits and pieces of lines by the blades of passing helicopters.

  We moved fast through the air, but the ground was not a blur. It was paths and trails and roads, muddy clearings and ponds and gas wells. Mostly it was the tops of trees. I couldn’t take my eyes off the ground. Everything was of a piece. The number of colors shrunk. There were hardly any people. People were scarce, gone inside, and the world had a life of its own, fine without us.

  My eyes grew bored with the ground. My gaze drifted towards the horizon. The edge of what I could see was Virginia disappearing into sky. I found Bilson Mountain, the radio tower, the bald where Willett and Kenny’s family had their place. Radio waves slid past the helicopter, flowed over under around us like water. My heartbeat quickened. The ground quickened, and I wanted to be on it, feet on its scars, shoulders in its narrow places. I wanted to hear quiet things, trickles and drips, the world’s parts scratching against each other.

  The helicopter’s blades had a beat, and my head began to move to it. It was a fast beat, a punk rock beat. The pilot asked was there anything in particular I wanted to see, and I ignored him. I saw the torn-up land, the towns and the trailers, creeks and ditches, dog lots and garden plots, and everything was just as it is, no better no worse. All of it made, everything made—some by people, some by forces bigger than people, some by a mix of the two. I raised up the camera and took pictures, but when I got back to the house and looked at them, they didn’t look like anything. They were more boring than maps—except for one.

  When the helicopter came back to the ballfield, there was a big yellow dot next to Mamaw I couldn’t figure out until we got closer. The dot was Willett in a yellow track suit made him look like a giant canary, like the magic pop can. And so I took a picture of Willett from the helicopter. And when I got the picture back, there were giant words on the ground beside him, and the words were inside an arrow pointing right at his big yellow dot self. And the words said: YOU ARE HERE.

  And I was. And I am.

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to acknowledge the following for their support: Stacey, Will, Will II, Laura, and Barbara Gipe; the genius writing teacher Darnell Arnoult; the Hell Of Our Own writers group, Bobby Amburgey, Wes Browne, Denton Loving, Donna McClanahan, Larry Thacker, Sylvia Woods, Tiffany Williams, and especially ace fellow literary sojourner Carrie Mullins; my Hindman writing family, especially Mike Mullins, Gurney Norman, Jim Minick, Jack Wright, Sharon Hatfield, Pat Beaver, George Brosi, George Singleton, Pam Duncan, Jesse Graves, and Jeanne Marie Hibberd; the editors of the online journal Still, Silas House, Jason Howard, and Marianne Worthington, for serializing the early parts of the book; Sandra Ballard for, among other things, introducing me to Gillian Berchowitz; everyone at the Ohio University Press; my Crawdad friends, especially Lauren Adams; my Higher Ground friends, especially Rick and Cindy Brock, and my technical advisor, Rutland Melton; my Southeast Community College friends, especially Larry LaFollette, Ann Schertz, Theresa Osborne, Bruce Ayers, Tony Sweatt, and the Scopa family; my students, especially Johnny Combs, Miranda Moore Payne, Donna Jo Collins, Bonnie Thomas, Lisa Frith, and Danielle Burke McMillian; Tom FitzGerald, Judy Hensley, Hazel King, Roy Silver, Teri Blanton, and the rest of the people involved in the struggle to protect the land and people in east Kentucky; Sue and Harry Orr and the writers in our Sweetwater Extended Novel Workshop; and Dee Davis, Mimi Pickering, Jim Webb, Tom Hansell, Jeff and Stephanie Whetstone, Frances M.O. Dowell, David and Michelle Reynolds, Ann Pancake, David Joy, Crystal Wilkinson and Ron Davis, Erin Fitzgerald, Clifford Pierce, and Watt Childress. Most particularly, I would like to acknowledge Robin Lambert, who has been my friend through it all, told me the truth, and given me good advice and love every step of the way. Thank you all.